Recent theories suggest that speech disfluencies result from a disruption in the time-dependent processes of phonological and phonetic encoding (Howell & Au-Yeung, 2002; Karniol, 1995; Perkins, Kent, & Curlee, 1991; Postma & Kolk, 1993; Wingate, 1988). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between phonological complexity and disfluencies in the speech of preschool-age children. It was predicted that speech disfluencies would be more likely to occur in utterances with a higher degree of phonological complexity than in utterances with a lower degree of phonological complexity.
Participants in this study were 12 monolingual English-speaking preschool-age children who stutter. Other than the diagnosis of stuttering, all 12 children exhibited normal speech, language, and hearing function. Each child was videotaped with a parent or guardian while engaged in a 30 minute free-play conversational interaction. Each of the participants utterances was examined to identify the presence of speech disfluencies. The presence of word-initial late-emerging consonants and consonant strings (LECi/CSi; Howell, Au-Yeung, & Sackin, 2000; Shriberg, 1993; Throneburg, Yairi, & Paden, 1994) and the Index of Phonetic Complexity (IPC; Jakielski, 2000) were utilized as metrics to identify a relationship between speech disfluencies and phonological complexity.
Logistic regression was employed to determine the relationship between phonological complexity and disfluency for each child individually and to determine if a similar relationship existed for the group as a whole. While the results of initial analyses suggested that an utterance with a higher phonological complexity score was more likely to be disfluent than an utterance with a lower phonological complexity score, post-hoc analyses did not support this initial conclusion. The results of post-hoc analyses suggested that the initial results were confounded by the effect of utterance length. The best fit to the logistic regression model was achieved by utterance length (in number of words). The addition of phonological complexity did not add significantly to the regression model.
The results of this study do not offer support to the contention that speech disfluency in young children is influenced by the phonological complexity of the utterance being produced (Howell et al., 2000; Weiss & Jakielski, 2001).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-03282006-212542 |
| Date | 30 January 2007 |
| Creators | Eldridge, Kevin Anthony |
| Contributors | Thomas Campbell, J. Scott Yaruss, Kathy Jakielski, Chris Dollaghan |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-03282006-212542/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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